Mrs. Dalloway is Everything, Everywhere, All at Once

Everything, Everywhere, All at Once is one of my favorite films. Mrs. Dalloway is one of my favorite novels. I couldn’t help but see parallels between these two great works of art, regarding their main premises, narrative styles, and ontological perspectives.

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Whether or not you’ve read Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, you could imagine the main character, Clarissa—a wealthy middle-aged Englishwoman in 1920’s London—planning a party for the evening. She is stifled by an unsatisfactory marriage and fears estrangement from her almost-adult daughter who she worries is unduly influenced by an older (purportedly lesbian) working class friend.

Now, imagine this same story in a new setting. Fast-forward about one hundred years, and visualize an apartment above a laundromat in Simi Valley, California. At a table strewn with papers sits Evelyn, a middle-aged Chinese immigrant who has EVERYTHING on her mind, including the party she’s throwing that evening, her exasperatingly ineffective husband, and her willful lesbian daughter. Evelyn is the main character in Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, the 2022 Academy Award-winning film directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert. 

Based on the overt similarities between the film and the novel, the premise of  Everything, Everywhere, All at Once appears in some regards to be a reformulation of Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. The film, however, as far as I could discern, makes zero direct allusions to Mrs. Dalloway, although perhaps the directors, in their brilliance, are aware of the narrative parallels.

But it really doesn’t matter anyway whether or how Mrs Dalloway shows up in the film, because EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE is already in this film ALL AT ONCE. References to pop culture abound. There are allusions to Planet of the Apes, Ratatouille, Star Wars, Dr. Suess, Michelle Yeoh’s character in Star Trek Discovery, Tron, Through the Looking Glass, Kung Fu Hustle, and The Matrix. The directors gesture toward anime, martial arts, and sci-fi genres in general. The film references itself; it creates films within the film and stories within the story. It not only travels through space and time, alighting on key locations in pop culture history, but it also manages to bust through through the time–space continuum. Myriad Evelyns live out wildly varied lives in limitless superimposed realities. Infinite potentialities slide past one another, sometimes colliding. So, whether intentional or not, allusions to Mrs. Dalloway simply form another layer of this existential palimpsest. 

The film’s pop culture mashup and seeming existential absurdism are heightened by its random silliness, which includes unlikely lovers with floppy hot dog fingers, evil Jaimie Lee Curtis, telepathic rocks, a googly third-eye, a ridiculous “Raccoonatouie” rescue, and, most delightful of all, a looming everything bagel of nihilism. And the disruptive narrative logic and not-entirely-cohesive main character further amplify the film’s effect. 

According to postmodernist theory, the world is irreversibly fragmented, splintered into self-referential late-stage-capitalism subcultures. Meaning is subjective. The human subject is contingent and mutable. Art consists of pastiche, ideologies are false, and there’s no such thing as an ontological truth. In these regards, the film undoubtedly has a postmodern aesthetic.  

But, however much the film adopts a postmodern aesthetic, at its core, it has a modernist ethic.

The modernists—author Virginia Woolf among them—shattered English-language narrative style as we’d known it, picking up the pieces and reassembling them into fresh forms. They also shattered narrative conceptions of space and time. Woolf’s Clarissa is spatially bound to the streets of London and temporally bound to the span of one day, but her stream-of-consciousness narrative nevertheless ranges freely through space and time. Mrs. Dalloway is suffused with images of invisible threads connecting people to one another and sound waves that dissipate into the air among London’s crowds. Such images are imaginatively connected through the endless “caves” that Woolf writes about in her diary. In some ways, Woolf’s threads and caves are analogous to Alpha Waymond’s computerized network of universes in Everything Everywhere. And while Mrs. Dalloway moves fluidly through space and time, Everything, Everywhere, All at Once takes us on a wild ride through space, time, and infinite universes. 

Broken literary conventions imply broken cultural narratives. Similarly to the postmodernists, modernists upended traditional perspectives, viewing the world as tragically fragmented. Human experience, according to modernists, is fractured into seemingly disconnected moments. But, the modernists differ from the postmodernists in that, despite the fractured nature of human experience, they assume an underlying wholeness, which human beings may apprehend in brief, transcendent moments. In Mrs. Dalloway, an iconic modernist novel, Clarissa remembers such a “moment … It was a sudden revelation … [in which she] felt the world come closer, swollen with some astonishing significance.” Clarissa’s moment hearkens back to Woolf’s idea, as expressed in one of her essays, that “behind the cotton wool [of everyday life] there is a pattern.”

Evelyn’s daughter, Joy, as her alter-ego Jobu Tupaki, is drawn toward nihilism, tempted by the ideological anarchy of the “everything bagel.” However, she doesn’t let go of the notion that somehow, somewhere, things might make sense. She describes human existence, encapsulating the modernist ethic: “Just a lifetime of fractured moments. Contradictions in the confusion.” But she admits that in fleeting and isolated moments there are indeed “a few specks of time where anything actually makes sense.” Evelyn, along these same lines, suggests underlying meaning, telling Joy that “maybe there is something out there.” Despite the film’s postmodern wackiness, with such statements, it fundamentally aligns itself with modernism.

In another uncanny (or deliberate?) parallel, both Everything Everywhere and Mrs. Dalloway culminate in parties that bring together disparate characters from both women’s lives. At each party, things crack open. Clarissa hears news of a tragic suicide––“her dress flamed, her body burnt” because “in the middle of my party, here’s death.” Evelyn performs a metaphorical death—signing divorce papers and sending a baseball bat full force through the front window of her laundromat. There’s discord and destruction. But then, reconciliation. 

At this point in the film, simultaneous interconnected realities flash across the screen, along with a montage of Evelyn’s multitudinous other selves. But the particular Evelyn and the particular Joy facing off in the parking lot outside the laundromat on this particular night still have to live out their particular and painful here and now. Evelyn, suddenly overcome with love for her daughter, tells her, “I will cherish these few specks of time” in which, according to Joy, “things actually make sense.” This is what Joy has been waiting to hear—her mother loves her. There are tears and an embrace. There’s momentary clarity: life is random and generally incomprehensible, but love makes sense, and it’s indescribably important to love others and talk to them honestly since we don’t actually know what the hell is going on. 

This scene is the brief but transcendent payoff for moviegoers—the deeper significance beneath the cinematic chaos. Thus, this often seemingly nonsensical film is imbued with a deeply profound speck of meaning. For, like a character states on the final page of Mrs. Dalloway, “What does the brain matter … compared with the heart?”